A majority of Americans have no idea what Mormons believe

Editor's note:The following abridged version of the original piece published in The New York Time Magazine was purchased from The New York Times Syndicate.

Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections. Mormons also embody, in their efficient organizational style, the managerial competence that the party's pro-business wing considers attractive. For the last half-century, Mormons have been so committed to the Republican Party that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints once felt the need to clarify that Republican affiliation is not an actual condition of church membership.

Yet 29 percent of Republicans told the Harris Poll earlier this year that they probably or definitely would not vote for a Mormon for president. Among evangelicals, some of the discomfort is narrowly religious: Mormon theology is sometimes understood as non-Christian and heretical. Elsewhere, the reasons for the aversion to Mormons are harder to pin down — bigotry can be funny that way — but they are certainly not theological. A majority of Americans have no idea what Mormons believe.

For Mitt Romney, the complex question of anti-Mormon bias boils down to the practical matter of how he can make it go away. In his religion speech, he coupled his promise to govern independently of the hierarchy of his own church with a profession of faith: "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind." Romney presumably calculated that speaking about Jesus Christ in terms that sound consistent with ordinary American Protestantism would reassure voters that there was in the end nothing especially unusual about Mormonism.

Even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is common to hear Mormonism's tenets dismissed as ridiculous. For some, then, the objection to Romney may be that Mormonism is religiously false and that voters should choose a president who belongs to the true faith. But most Mormonism-related discomfort with Romney may, in fact, reflect less a view of religious truth than a sense that there is something vaguely troubling or unfamiliar in the Mormon manner or worldview.

This latter possibility presents Romney with an especially tricky political problem. For such reservations are not simple prejudice; they are a complicated outgrowth of the tortured history of the faith's relationship to mainstream American political life over the nearly two centuries since God first spoke to Joseph Smith.